


Live Long and Prosper

by draculard



Category: Catalyst - Laurie Halse Anderson
Genre: Abusive Parents, Canonical Character Death, Child Neglect, Eating Disorders, F/F, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Implied Incest, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Pre-Relationship, Star Trek References, Teenage Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-26
Updated: 2019-08-26
Packaged: 2020-09-27 09:06:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20405182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: Teri and Kate get into their very first fight when they're seven years old, and it's all because of a stupid Star Trek book.





	Live Long and Prosper

Kate gets into her very first fight with Teri Litch when she’s seven years old at a churchyard rummage sale. There’s an old woman who drops off a massive cardboard box stuffed full of musty paperbacks, and as soon as she sets it down, Kate makes a beeline for it, leaving her Mom and Dad at opposite ends of the sale.

Dad, dressed in the light summer version of his Sunday best, doesn’t notice that Kate is on a collision course with the scrawny greasy-haired girl who lives down the hill. Mom, wearing a modest sundress and chatting with a member of the choir, doesn’t notice either.

For five minutes, Kate looks through the cardboard box, the concrete digging into her bare knees, the sun hot on the back of her neck. She’s not dressed up nice like Mom and Dad; she’s wearing denim shorts and a red Mickey Mouse shirt that she pretends she got from Disney World, even though she’s never been. She flips through the books  — a lot of boring ones she’s never heard of  — until she comes across a familiar name and her heart leaps with excitement,

The book is called  _ Spock, Messiah!  _ It’s slim and yellowed with a stain on the cover, but Kate’s eyes are fixed on the majestic illustration of Spock, his arms crossed. He gazes out at the reader sternly, backlit by a psychedelic glow.

Quickly, Kate checks the price written on the box with Sharpie. Five cents a book. She has five cents! She pushes herself to her feet, wobbles a little, and turns, ready to run to Mom and ask if she can get it.

Instead, she runs into Teri.

“That’s  _ my _ book,” Teri says before Kate can gather her wits. She sees Teri’s grubby hand reaching out for it and by reflex pulls  _ Spock, Messiah!  _ out of reach.

“I found it first,” says Kate automatically. Her voice shows none of the bewilderment she’s feeling. Teri Litch hates books and she hates Star Trek, too. Teri Litch is in the slow class for reading; she spends an hour each day sounding out picture books with an elderly volunteer, and everyone’s heard that volunteer losing her patience and snapping at Teri because she just can’t get it right.

And when Kate wore her Starfleet pajamas to class for PJ Day, Teri was the first one to make fun of her for it. Maybe that’s her key out of this mess.

“You won’t like it,” Kate says reasonably, holding the book behind her back when Teri’s hands clench into fists. “It’s sci-fi.”

“So?” says Teri. Heart beating fast, Kate says,

“You hate sci-fi.”

“No I don’t,” says Teri immediately. This is such a blatant, unfair lie that Kate doesn’t know how to counter it. Tears spring to her eyes and she swallows hard, still hiding the book.

“I found it first,” she says again, voice wavering. It’s all she can think of to say. With any other kid, it would work. They would understand the playground rules of Finders Keepers and First Come First Served. They would back off  — maybe pouting, but still  — and leave Kate to her well-deserved book.

“Well, I want it,” Teri says, as if it’s that simple.

“You have to buy it,” Kate counters. “It costs a nickel. Do you have a nickel?”

Teri’s eyebrows twitch and she says nothing, her face a solemn mask. Kate pounces on this hesitation, suddenly aware that victory is in her hands. She takes a few steps back, and to her delight, Teri doesn’t follow her.

“I bet you don’t even have a nickel,” she says, the thrill of a win soaring through her. “I bet you can’t even buy the book anyway.”

Teri scowls, and Kate starts to back away even faster, aware that now she’s pushed her luck. But she backs right into one of the tables filled with useless grown-up things  — porcelain figurines and candle-holders and things like that  — and in the blink of an eye, she’s down on the ground, her spine twinging from where it made contact with the table edge.

And a moment later, Teri is upon her, ripping the book out of her hands.

“Hey!” Kate cries, and she grabs onto Teri’s hair by instinct, trying to keep her from running away. She feels her cheek stinging and realizes that at some point  — probably as she grabbed the book  — Teri must have punched her. 

Teri’s head tilts downward, dragged closer to the concrete by Kate’s grip. She arcs the book high above her head and slams it down into Kate’s forehead; it’s not the brief flare of pain that offends Kate. It’s the sight of the book cover bending sharply backward when it collides with her skull, almost ripping straight off the spine.

“Stop!” Kate screams, but Teri doesn’t. Wildly, Kate lashes out, unable to land much more than a glancing blow  — and nothing seems to faze Teri, anyway. She keeps bringing the book to bear, striking out against Kate’s face, against her head, against her chest and arms. Kate rolls to the right, desperately attempting to throw Teri off her, and recoils when the two of them crash right into the table filled with porcelain and glass.

She covers her face with her arms, blocking the spray of shattered figurines that rains down on her. Teri isn’t so lucky; she’s clobbered in the back of the head by a mostly-intact statuette of an angel. 

Kate’s first instinct, despite the fight, is to help. She doesn’t get the chance; before she can so much as roll onto her knees and examine Teri’s new wound, someone has grabbed her beneath the arms and hauled her to the feet. She watches as her dad kneels next to Teri, cooing to her like he would to an injured puppy.

It must be Mom holding her up, then, Kate deduces  — and when she cranes her neck to look over her shoulder, it turns out she’s correct.

And Mom is furious.

* * *

In the end, Kate’s not sure what happens to the book. She certainly doesn’t buy it with her nickel. The last she sees it is as her mom drags her away; it’s clutched tightly in Teri’s bloody-knuckled hand, the cover bent all the way back, the pages crumpled.

_ That’s not fair, _ Kate thinks, a little bit of her old rage bubbling up again when she sees that Teri’s angel-inflicted wound isn’t fatal.  _ She doesn’t even like Star Trek. _

* * *

Years later, when she follows Teri back home from the chicken-and-biscuits dinner, she sees that book again. It’s tucked into a bookshelf in the Litch living room, hanging out innocuously between dozens of other old paperbacks just like it. There’s a bright orange spine to the left of it with letters reading  _ Spock Must Die,  _ and a cracked blue spine to the right reading  _ Star Trek: The New Voyages. _

While Dad talks to Mrs. Litch and Teri fiddles with her new stolen watch and Mikey putters about on the floor, Kate kneels before the bookshelf and slides  _ Spock, Messiah!  _ out to examine it. She can see a thick crease across the middle of the cover, bisecting Spock, where she and Teri bent it back during their fight. There’s a spot of dried, brown blood next to Spock’s shoes. 

She can’t tell if it’s been read or not, but she can tell that the pages have been lovingly straightened out. She can hardly tell they were ever crumpled. Glancing over her shoulder at Dad, she wonders if he would have let her read a book comparing a fictional alien to Jesus Christ, anyway.

She puts it back on the shelf, careful not to bend the corners, and goes back to the doorway, where she leans against the wall and crosses her arms and waits for this whole ordeal to be over. Teri watches her go, a smug and somehow angry look in her eyes, and Kate suspects she’s remembering their first fight, too.

She tries to imagine seven-year-old Teri sounding out the word  _ Enterprise.  _ She tries to imagine seven-year-old Teri watching Star Trek re-runs on TV. What character could Teri possibly relate to? Not Spock, surely. Not Kirk, not McCoy. Spock never beat anybody up just for the fun of it. Kirk would never leave the house smelling like cigarette smoke so strongly he made the other kids gag. McCoy’s dad probably never raped anybody, never went to jail; Sulu didn’t shoplift, and Uhura didn’t gain a hundred pounds her freshman year of high school only to stop eating entirely in tenth grade.

Maybe Teri relates to the Klingons, then.

* * *

Later on, much later, Teri and Kate sit back-to-back in the unfinished playroom and remove Mikey’s toys from a laundry basket. Their hands brush every time they reach inside for another Hot Wheels car or plastic truck; Teri’s knuckles are lumpy with scars. 

It’s not just cars in the laundry basket. There are action figures, too  — Power Rangers and wrestlers, mostly. At the bottom of the basket, Kate’s fingers hit another action figure and she grabs it without looking. When she moves to put it in line with all the other toys, she hesitates. She finally sees what it is.

Spock, his paint faded, his left arm broken at the elbow, his right held up in the Vulcan greeting. Live Long and Prosper. 

It’s such an ancient figurine, it must have belonged to Teri before it belonged to Mikey. Did they play Star Trek together, using the Power Rangers and wrestlers to represent Kirk and Bones and Sulu and whatever enemy-of-the-week they were facing? There’s a legless Barbie already sitting in line with the toy trucks; was that who they used for Uhura? Did Mikey watch Star Trek? Did Teri read to him from  _ Spock, Messiah? _

Did he know what the Vulcan salute meant?

Kate’s throat tightens, threatening to choke her. The basket is empty now, the circle complete. There’s no room in the line for Spock. She holds him in her left hand, her fingers clenched around his plastic body.

Her right hand creeps over the playroom floor until it finds Teri’s. She holds Teri’s hand as tight as she’s holding Spock. She squeezes until she’s worried Teri’s fingers might break, and Teri squeezes back.

Maybe Spock never beat anybody up, and maybe he wasn’t raped by his dad, and maybe he never had to juggle vocational school with raising a two-year-old son. But he knew a little bit about being a misfit, Kate supposes, and having green skin and pointed ears in a human world isn’t all that different, really, from the things seven-year-old Teri was made fun of for  — being ugly, wearing Salvation Army clothes, smelling like cigarettes and never washing her hair.

From her seat in the middle of the circle, Kate is just about eye-level with Mikey’s yellow handprints on the wall. 

Her vision’s getting blurry. She closes her eyes.

She holds Teri’s hand.


End file.
